Groupon spurns $6 billion offer from Google

Below are the stories I covered for this bi-weekly edition of the OPA intelligence report. Follow the links to read individual stories or click here for full coverage of the top online media news. Any comments are welcome below.

Intelligence Report – 12/06/2010
By Mark Glaser & Corbin Hiar

NEWS

		Groupon spurns $6 billion offer from Google
		Branson vs. Murdoch in iPad-only publications
		Salon looks for possible buyer
		Bubble 2.0? Massive valuations for Twitter, Facebook

RESEARCH

		BIA/Kelsey: Mobile, geo-targeted ads ready to boom
		Gartner: Tablet sales eating into PC sales

 

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Facebook vs. Google in messaging, data-sharing war

Below are the stories I covered for this bi-weekly edition of the OPA intelligence report. Follow the links to read individual stories or click here for full coverage of the top online media news. Any comments are welcome below.

Intelligence Report – 11/22/2010
By Mark Glaser and Corbin Hiar

NEWS

		Facebook vs. Google in messaging, data-sharing war
		Can Newsweek-Daily Beast merger bring profits?
		Obama administration pushes for online privacy
		Tablet Roundup: Digital newsstand coming; Kindle ups royalties

RESEARCH

		IAB: Online ad sales break records; Meeker predicts more
		One-third of top grossing iPhone apps use freemium model

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Can AOL, MySpace, Digg rebound?

Below are the stories I covered for this bi-weekly edition of the OPA intelligence report. Follow the links to read individual stories or click here for full coverage of the top online media news. Any comments are welcome below.

Intelligence Report – 11/8/2010
By Mark Glaser & Corbin Hiar

NEWS

		Can AOL, MySpace, Digg rebound?
		Payments Roundup: Times UK pay wall, PayPal micropayments
		Google’s gift to journalism: $5 million
		Facebook takes on Groupon in daily deals

RESEARCH

		Smartphones, Android on the rise
		Political ad spend up online, but just 1.5% of total

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Google, Apple have monster earnings as ad sales soar

Below are the stories I covered for this bi-weekly edition of the OPA intelligence report. Follow the links to read individual stories or click here for full coverage of the top online media news. Any comments are welcome below.

Intelligence Report – 10/25/2010
By Mark Glaser & Corbin Hiar

NEWS

		Google, Apple have monster earnings as ad sales soar
		AP helps build apps, rights clearinghouse
		Facebook makes Bing deal, Skype integration
		Starbucks goes hyper-hyper local

RESEARCH

		eMarketer: Mobile ad market to top $1 billion in ’11
		Perfect Market: Serious news = higher CPMs

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AOL on a shopping spree – buys TechCrunch

Below are the stories I covered for this bi-weekly edition of the OPA intelligence report. Follow the links to read individual stories or click here for full coverage of the top online media news. Any comments are welcome below.

Intelligence Report – 10/11/2010
By Mark Glaser & Corbin Hiar

NEWS

		AOL buys TechCrunch in shopping spree
		@DickC in charge at Twitter, adds Promoted Accounts
		Boston.com to do separate free, pay sites
		Mobile Roundup: iPad boom; new Verizon iPhone?

RESEARCH

		MediaVest: Finding the right time, place to advertise online
		Google: 50% of targeted ads sold in real-time by 2015

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Twitter upgrades site experience for users and, potentially, advertisers

Below are the stories I covered for this bi-weekly edition of the OPA intelligence report. Follow the links to read individual stories or click here for full coverage of the top online media news. Any comments are welcome below.

Intelligence Report – 9/27/2010
By Mark Glaser & Corbin Hiar

NEWS

		Twitter upgrades site experience for users and, potentially, advertisers
		NY Times’ digital revenues up, but challenges remain
		Foursquare returns fire on Facebook with upgrade
		Publishers haggle with Apple over subscription split

RESEARCH

		Pew: Search, social driving growth in news consumption
		InMobi: Nokia is global leader in mobile ads

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Bright future for online ads; newspaper revenues will stabilize

Below are the stories I covered for this bi-weekly edition of the OPA intelligence report. Follow the links to read individual stories or click here for full coverage of the top online media news. Any comments are welcome below.

Intelligence Report – 9/13/2010
By Mark Glaser and Corbin Hiar

NEWS

		Google makes search “Instant”; renews AOL search deal
		Apple launches Ping social network, unfriends Facebook
		As Digg staggers, Reddit wants to bury it
		Apple loosens restrictions on mobile apps, ads

RESEARCH

		Kagan: Bright future for online ads; newspaper revenues will stabilize
		Smartphone market booming, with Android leading growth

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The NY Times Paywall: Worth the Wait

This morning, Kevin commented on the announcement by the New York Times that it intends to build a paywall around its content… starting next year:

This is sort of odd. Why wait until 2011? The technology for tracking visits isn’t very hard to implement. And why announce this without answers to basic questions like “how many stories can I read for free?”

Reading between the lines of their carefully worded announcement, I think the answers to his questions are pretty clear. The Grey Lady has an out-sized presence in the American media market. Any move she makes is both influential—and unsettling.

The lead time allows the Times‘ other competitors here and abroad to carefully rethink their online media strategies. The current online model practiced by most major newspapers—put everything on the Web for free—is less of a strategy and more an accident of history. The Internet pounced on a profitable and antiquated industry and has been diverting content and revenues it ever since. On the bright side, this change has brought about the advent of blogging and an unparalleled era of free information. But as Times‘ media critic David Carr noted, “people who remain reflexively bullish on free ignore the fact that the clock is ticking on many of the legacy businesses that produce that content.” (For “legacy business,” see the Los Angeles Times.)

If other news sites don’t choose to fight over the NYTimes.com readers repelled by its paywall, a surprise beneficiary of their new strategy could be Steve Brill’s much-hyped Journalism Online venture. Carr dismissed working with third parties like Brill, Amazon, or Apple, saying, “the golden rule in digital matters is that the man in the middle makes the gold.” Still, smaller rivals like the LA Times or Chicago Sun-Times could find working with a middleman preferable to being out of work.

Click here to read the rest of the MoJo blog post.

Photo credit: wallyg (via Flickr)

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The Conde Nast Conspiracy

Last week, a shocking GQ investigative report, “None Dare Call it Conspiracy,” hit the newsstands. Not that most people would know about it. Oddly, the magazine’s parent company, Conde Nast, seems bent on squelching the explosive article.

The report links Russia’s intelligence service to a series of bombings in 1999—blamed on Chechen terrorists—that killed over 300 Russian citizens, led to the Second Chechen War, and propelled Vladimir Putin to the presidency. At the center of the story is a Mikhail Trepashkin, a former KGB-turned-FSB agent, whose detailed allegations draw into question Putin’s role in the bombings. Similar inquiries have led to the mysterious deaths of both journalist Anna Politkovskaya and Trepashkin’s former colleague Alexander Litvinenko.

Perhaps fearing that the story would impact the advertising revenues of the four titles Conde Nast publishes in the Russian market, the media company has attempted to bury the piece. In an internal email on July 23, obtained by NPR’s David Folkenflik, one of the media company’s top lawyers informed GQ editors that “Conde Nast management has decided that the September issue of US GQ magazine containing Scott Anderson’s article…should not be distributed in Russia.” The report was not teased on the magazine’s cover and, as of now, is not available on the magazine’s website. Gawker has attempted to rectify the situation by posting a scanned copy of the article on its website and asking readers to help them translate the article into Russian.

While Conde Nast has thus far been silent on the NPR report (they did not respond to my request for comment), this appears to be a clear-cut case of commercial interests trumping journalistic integrity. As Scott Anderson, the author of the piece said to Folkenflik

I think it’s really kind of sad. Here now is finally an outlet for this story to be told, and you do everything possible to throw a tarp over it.

By attempting to stifle the report, Conde Nast has may end up succeeding in bringing more attention to the piece. That, and inadvertently making one of the strongest arguments yet for supporting independent nonprofit media like NPR (and Mother Jones).

Click here to see the original Riff blog post or make a comment.

Picture credit: benmurphyonline (via Flickr)

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The Climate Changes, Politics Stay the Same

Originally this was a screed against the complacent US political class with “Politicians” in the place of “Politics” in the title.  My editor sent the heavily redacted piece with the comment “your time at the Nation is certainly showing. I reined you in a bit.”

Really, it wasn’t The Nation or any magazine in particular.  The vitriol was the cumulative result of watching supposedly progressive politicians negotiate the cap-and-trade bill into near uselessness while everyone wrings their hands over health care reform.  Global warming is the main event, health care is the undercard regardless of what the media or any opinion polls suggest.

For more of that (with a dash of New York news), see blow:

On June 18^th New York inaugurated the latest signpost on the road to our demise: Deutsche Bank’s massive Carbon Counter. Like the ever-escalating National Debt Clock, it is a macabre monument to our collective failure to address a serious problem.

Across the street from Madison Square Garden, the carbon clock is a 70-foot-tall real-time digital tally of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) that are altering the earth’s average surface temperatures. For calculation purposes, potent GHGs, such as methane, nitrous dioxide and halocarbons—all of which are would be comprehensively regulated for the first time by the enfeebled Waxman-Markey bill—are converted into their equivalent metric tonnage of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common GHG. The science behind the numbers came from mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Deutsche Bank is offsetting the emissions from the counter’s energy-efficient LED technology.

To read the rest of the blog post or to vent your own rage, click here.

Picture credits: Roberto Rizzato, _Massimo_ (via Flickr)

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